My old friend, Hal Josephson, sent me the link to a site that lists web sites where there is an underlying model that rewards content owners.

Scott Kirsner is doing this as part of research for a book, "The Future Of Web Video".

I just saw that Xerox has launched a semantics based search engine. That is one that ascribes meaning to the way words work together and can make intelligent guesses.

I wonder how quickly this kind of approach can be applied to video results in a flash environment.

One thing I don't want to miss out on from the meeting yesterday...

Several of the people there had a very negative view of the near future in Australia.

There was definitely a significant leaning toward the belief that global warming is going to have very significant impact on this country.

Water is the big item.

Not enough water to drink and sea levels rising too much, too quickly. I really don't like voicing this here, but I am shocked. To find that when you sit in a room of scientists you find that there is a predominant view that unless the Government really takes a major turn, we are all in the shit. And at the moment both major parties are interchangeable in this discussion. They are both more likely to wimp out.

I took part in a really interesting workshop yesterday - at NICTA. Which by the way is now one of the largest R&D labs in the world, with over 600 PhD's, I believe, doing hard core research.

Its theme was to help create a vision of what would be driving ICT technologies in 2020.

Very interesting group of people there, including Dean Economou, Bruce McCabe, Ian Allen, and Joanne Jacobs along with David Skellern, Terry Percival and numerous others.

The one thing that I took away from this was the overriding concern from everyone in the room for sustainability. That is: that we have to make massive changes societally as well as technologically. Everyone in the room, I believe, saw this need. So creators of new technology have to ensure that there is dialogue with and attention to communities, lawmakers and media.

Tim Churches, who was there, said, "Technology is the new politics". Interesting stuff, indeed!

(By the way, the event was excellently facilitated by Rhett Sampson)

"The folks at Mashale have posted a great list of 33 online video sites. They run the gamut from the ones you know, such as YouTube and Joost, to ones you might not know of. " from www.randomculture.com .

33 Ways to Watch Free TV Online June 18, 2007 — 09:58 AM PDT — by Stan Schroeder

It’s time to toss the old tube to the dumpster. Well, not if you have one of those 47” plasma ones, but…you know what we mean. The future of media is the Internet, and television is no exception. Instead of browsing through the channels with your remote, you could be browsing through the free online TV providers on your computer - hell, if you like, you can watch them all at once (in really tiny windows). It’s time to reach out and see how much free online TV we can find..."

One of the interesting little bits of trivia about the record, "High Voltage' is that it was not on the album called, "High Voltage".

I remember suggesting to George and Harry, and the band, that we call the first AC/DC album, "High Voltage". Which we did. The band really liked the title, so they wrote a song by that name. But by the time they had recorded it, we had the album in production in Australia and had already gone gold, and were on the way to going platinum.

But we were two singles into the album and didn't feel like we had a third, and George and Harry were keen to get High Voltage out, because it really rocked and sounded so fresh. Michael Browning, the band's manager, wanted the song out too, because the band were playing it live and it was going down a storm.

So we took what I believe is an unprecedented step. We released a single with the same title as an album, without the single being on the album of the same name. No one in their right mind would do that today.

And what happened was wonderful.

The album had done about 75 or 80 thousand copies in Australia at the time we put the single out. It flew up the charts and helped drive album sales of the album of the same name, without the single on it, to over 120,000 copies. (I remember it like yesterday!) And no one complained!

In fact when the next album came out - I think it was "Dirty Deeds..." which did feature the single, that album took off at a fantastic rate....

I think it is all about the power of doing what feels right at the time. And of course having a hot band helps!

I was blogging earlier about the film making of Larry Larstead, and then discovered the video of "High Voltage" that he directed on YouTube. Here it is:

I came across the following, while reading the fantastic new book by Al Gore, "The Assault On Reason".

It is about Edward Bernays, the father of public relations - and of advertising.


It has been my belief for some years now that one of the critical challenges that each of us must deal with nowadays is to be able to determine the difference between our needs and desires, so I was tremendously interested to read this quote.

Robyn, my wife said, after I read the above quote to her earlier this evening that we have gone beyond this now. The momentum of the change that was wrought by Bernays and Mazur has led to not only America buying into the cultural shift, but moving to a point now where we have a rights culture. Now Australian - and American - in fact all Western society - has moved to believe that they have a right to things. Straight past Maslow's pyramid of needs to a pyramid of rights.

Ross Dawson's Web 2.0 event was, by all accounts, a tremendous success. Well done, Ross!

And you can see a whole lot of video from the event as his blog. One Minute World shot individual pieces with each of the presenters.

Here is Brad Howarth from the conference:

We have had very unusual weather in Sydney in the last two weeks.

And I suppose that helps bring out some of the best that nature has to offer.

For the last two days in Centennial Park just up the road from where I live there have been masses of these incredibly bright red mushrooms with orange spots growing just near the path. Like something out of Tolkien! (Sorry about the quality of the pic. Taken with my phone)